Comment: Time is running out for the Lib Dems on diversity

The Lib Dems could be the first party to introduce minority-only shortlists at the next election, ran a recent headline.

With just eight MPS, who are all white and all male, you would have thought more diversity couldn’t come soon enough, but it is still meeting some resistance from grassroots backwoodsmen.

124 years after Dadabhai Naoroji was elected as Liberal member for Finsbury Central in London, the party awaits the next MP of colour returned at a general election.

The dawning realisation that the Lib Dems cannot compete across large swathes of multicultural Britain without getting its’ diversity act together is now universally accepted in the ranks, but the question of what should be done, of how far and fast to travel, remains unresolved.

So far evolutionists have the upper hand over revolutionaries and a diversity motion, due to be debated at the party’s spring conference next month, will most likely see a large dose of rhetoric and a tiny drop of actual change.

The party have never had a visible minority in the London or Welsh assembly or the Scottish parliament and only ever had one such MEP, who then defected to the Tories. It’s a miserable return for a party with the word equality sewn onto their sleeves.

Lib Dems are divided on what to do. Some want radical measures like all-women and all-BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) shortlists; others a bit more training and support for wannabe MPs.

A small but vocal band of ultra-liberal fundamentalists want no change whatsoever, based on a belief that because everyone is equal that means tackling inequality is somehow discrimination and anyone who disagrees is ‘illiberal’.

The party’s mainstream is in the middle, which is not where they should be if they are serious.

There’s another strand of opinion, the mourners. They say: ‘Our local [white, male] former MP [who lost his seat] has [had] local name recognition. Surely he stands a better chance of winning it back than some ‘diverse’ newcomer who’s not from around these parts.’

This rests on an assumption that the defeated MP will be fondly remembered and locals are aching to welcome back their homely and familiar Lib Dem.

It’s natural for the faithful to emotionally pine for their old MP but in reality even long-standing veteran politicians can be quickly forgotten. The world spins on.

Diversity cannot wait for the greybeards to die off. The decimation of Lib Dems in 2015, as painful as it was, is an opportunity to move forward, not an excuse to bring yesterday’s men out of retirement while the future joins the back of the queue.

There have been several conference motions before all calling for greater candidate diversity. Two of those were driven by BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) members, both watered down amid heated debate.

That a decade of talk has failed to reap results should give all pause for serious reflection.

The last motion introduced a diversity A-list called the Candidates Leadership Programme, covering all under-represented groups to polish up talent in all equalities ‘strands’ with a bit of extra training and mentoring.

None of the programme’s participants were elected, largely due to a nationwide collapse at the ballot box. But theoretically if that hadn’t happened most of the beneficiaries would have been white women.

There is no question the Lib Dems desperately needs greater gender diversity, yet some BAME activists feel they are being left behind. Three A-list candidates of colour were selected in what used to be winnable seats and two of them stood down before the starting gun had been fired.

Back in 2008 Nick Clegg told a Speakers Inquiry into diversity that he would consider all-BAME shortlists by ‘the election after next’ if his MPs were still all-white. The election-after-next is now the one just past.

During the last leadership contest Tim Farron said he wouldn’t rule out such measures, but hoped that success could be achieved by more liberal means.

The trouble with the evolutionary path is that it relies more on wings and prayers than expectation that progress will be delivered. It is a gamble with a dice that has never come up six, while the gambler cannot bring themselves to contemplate that the game might be rigged against BAME candidates.

‘Where is the concrete evidence of race discrimination in selections?’, my favourite party troll has asked me many times. The answer is always the same; if it was explicit and obvious the perpetrators would already be expelled.

Institutional racism has always been a complex mix of unconscious bias, self-replication tendencies, old boy networks, stereotyping and sophisticated hiding of prejudice. People from all these categories can happily combine in a single selection to pick the best person for the job, inevitably a white, middle class man.

This is why radical mechanisms like all-BAME shortlists are needed. Because unpicking this is nigh-on impossible for an organisation of volunteers. Better to force change and then for members to realise they had actually selected an excellent candidate and MP.

While more are coming round to the idea that ‘unpalatable’ policies may be required to get more diverse MPs, many ethnic minority members such as myself remain frustrated.

The gap between intense frustration and well-meaning liberal mild concern is down to experiences. BAME members feel the party’s reputational damage of an all-white middle class image from family, friends and the community.

They better understand how the disproportionate impact of coalition austerity on BAME people and other narratives fold into this, and how BAME MPs can back race equality policies to help unfold it.

The fact that the Tories, who have already made great strides on black representation, are discussing race equality strategies and the prime minister is talking and writing about these issues risks further entrenching the Lib Dems in public consciousness as the nice-but-dim party.

An example of this dimness can be witnessed in debate about the spring conference motion. Despite rising temperatures about ‘all-minority shortlists’ in reality the motion only commits to training and support – in other words more of the same.

The motion ends with a vague reference to the possibility of all-women and all-disability shortlists sometime in the future, but no mention of all-BAME shortlists.

This anaemic motion so disappointed the group representing BAME members – Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats (EMLD) – that they refused to support it in its current form.

The Lib Dems are running out of time to change their image, as I’ve warned before. More influential members recognise this but are so far not using their influence or persuasion to take the party more than one baby step forward at a time.

It’s time for the leadership to break from deference to the federal nature of the party, and the behind-the-curve attitudes of leaflet-deliverers, to drag the party into the 21st century on BAME representation instead of sitting on the fence and waiting for the grassroots to catch up.

Lester Holloway is a former councillor and current member of EMLD, writing in a personal capacity. Follow him on Twitter

5 Responses to “Comment: Time is running out for the Lib Dems on diversity”

Lester Holloway

Simon, as a Lib Dem member of many years you will know that a high proportion of conference motions call for changes in the law. It’s the stock-in-trade of politics; to argue not just for changes that do not require legislation but to argue for changes that do. Aside from contentions that all-BAME could be legal – I won’t go into that because it is refuted by others and untested – our own previous leader has called, in the Speakers Inquiry, for secondary legislation to enable all-BAME lists so that all parties have the choice of whether to use them or when. There are many Labour politicians who have made the same call, including David Lammy. Further, Labour have already had four all-BAME shortlists, all in safe or highly winnable seats, unofficially (ie. they were shortlists that just happened to be all-BAME). The reality is that some these unofficial all-BAME selections came amid a background of BAME members saying ‘if we can’t get a candidate of colour here where can we?’ But back to the Lib Dems… all-disabilities shortlists (mentioned in the motion) would fall under the same category as all-BAME (which isn’t). I have heard the excuse you make already about the law, and in the context of the rest of my comment above this is just not a credible argument. I’ve got a more plausible explanation; that Black representation was just low down on the hierarchy of equality of those putting this motion together.

Imran Khan

I am surprised that Lester Holloway is still flogging this dead horse. His preoccupation with it is due largely to the fact that he still wants to be an MP despite having been deselected as a councillor in a South West London borough.

His basic premise is that ethnic minorities will only vote for their own and if there are therefore no ethnic minority candidates then that explains the low turn out amongst ethnic minorities. At best this is patronising and at worst racist. As a person of Pakistani descent am I supposed to not vote until I am presented with a candidate, from whatever party, that happens to have the same ethnic background as myself?

I vote on the basis of political belief and not race as do all of the other people I know from ethnic minority backgrounds. I am afraid Mr Holloway is flogging the failed identity politics of the 80s and 90s and seems to be quite happy for people to stay with their self made ghettos. No thanks.

Imran Khan

Ian

The Lib Dems are an irrelevance and rightly so, it’s Labour who need some more diversity – chiefly they need to stop pretending their traditional working class – especially white working class – voters don’t exist and cutting us out of the picture, politically, altogether. I know the modern Labour upper echelons are embarrassed by us, with our regional accents and unseemly dietary habits but the party will ignore us at its peril. We have been ignored long enough, he more you concentrate on everyone else but us, the more we’ll stay at home come polling day.

Identity politics has always been a deception, more about redistributing inequality – no corporate glass ceiling, more black people in authority etc – rather than rdistributing wealth and opportunity for all. More women in the boardromm, for example, looks good on the face of it but you can bet your backside it will be more *middle class* women, some single mother from an estate can piss off and work in Primark or Sports Direct.

Labour needs to earn our votes, it hadn’t before the last General Election, you saw what happened then. They failed not because they were too left wing, which self-interested quislings like Danczuk and Umunna would have had you believe, but because they were chasing the middle-class right vote. Anyone still banging the drum for a shift back to the right needs to look at Corbyn’s popularity and be quiet.

Gender politics is divisive, disingenuous neo-liberal nonsense that serves only to give the illusion of equality.